fine whine

Today I finished watching the fiftieth Indian* movie I've seen. It was called Tarzaan: the wonder car (imdb) and there's a very good chance you'll never watch it, so I'll tell you what it's about. Anybody not wanting the story spoiled should skip past the blockquotes below.

It's about a kid who likes cars - designing them, driving them, fixing them and putting them together. We see in the beginning scenes that his father designed cars too, creating one so advanced that the mere royalties from selling the design should have set him and his family for life. The story takes a sad turn almost immediately as the designer is cheated, and then killed, by the corrupt partners of a major car-maker who intend to bury the innovative design forever. Nothing stays buried forever, though, and we find that our protagonist discovers the car his father was killed driving, and decides to rebuild it. He's got a few factors in his favor - he's got the determination that comes from being teased by the popular kids, a girlfriend who supports him whole-heartedly, a job as a mechanic with a boss who's willing to pay him to work on his pet projects on company time, and he's a mechanical wizard.

After a long montage he's almost finished with the rebuilt car, which looks nothing at all like it did before. The only piece he couldn't find or fix was the fuel pump, but overnight the existing one supernaturally fixes itself... spooky. The next day he drives it to school and it becomes the object of envy for all the students, especially the ones who bullied him. Later that night, while he sleeps, the car, apparently driving itself, tracks them down, and beats them up in a pretty humiliating fashion. They of course do not know that he's not at the wheel, and begin treating him considerably better from then on (after recuperating from their injuries, of course).

Faring less well are the partners who killed his dad - one by one they are hunted down by the car which can not only drive itself, but also can completely repair itself too. The last one turns out to be the father of our protagonist's fiancee, and the climactic battle on land and sea (the car can fly, submerge in water, and float) reveals the driving force to be the spirit of his father. He walks off into the light, and the car never drives itself again.

The father, it should be mentioned, christened his car "Tarzan" as a child, and the name stuck over the years as he hung a figurine of Tarzan (from Disney's animated version, oddly enough) from the rear view mirror.

Some might call it a rip-off of Christine, or perhaps The Wraith, but it's those things and so much more. It could well be the strangest Bollywood movie I've seen so far, but it's by far not the worst. Now that I've seen a good number of them, I think I can pretty well say that.

By now you may be wondering why I've done this. Early this year I happened to watch a horrible Hindi movie entitled Dhund (imdb), though the title "The Fog" figured prominently on the cover. I'd not found many promising movies to borrow from the library that day, and happened to stumble across this one in the foreign languages section.

It was the worst movie I'd watched in a long time, no matter what the language. I was surprised that fog only figured into a scene and a song (I'd heard Bollywood movies included songs and dance, sometimes jarringly, throughout the film) and the plot was much closer to any of the I (still) know what you did last summer films. Except that it was much, much worse.

As a connoisseur of bad films, though, I saw some potential and began to do some research. Namely I talked to any Indian people I could find about the films they liked. The consensus was unanimous - it was an awful movie. I then watched one better - Dus - and started off on a long list of other, much better, Bollywood and Hindi movies.

So now I've seen fifty of them, including one I watched without any subtitles (borrowed VCD), and another that had been dubbed into German (pirate download). Now that one may be a contender for the worst one I'd seen, more conceptually than anything, as it was a remake (in name only) of Fight club, I kid you not.

But that's enough for now. I've got both versions of Don to watch - that's at least six hours of film. Maybe I'll write about them too.

* It's probably safe to call them 'Bollywood' movies, though I might argue against that on one or two.